When a film takes in over $100 million in its first weekend, no one much cares what reviewers say about it. The corporate verdict is in. Negative reactions can be dismissed as “elitist,” a word that has become pivotal in presidential campaign rhetoric. Positive comments can be lamented a
There Will Be Blood opens in 1897, 15 years earlier than its literary source, Upton Sinclair’s Oil! The shift is significant. In 1890 the Census Bureau declared that the American frontier had been closed and the expansion of the United States from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific had been com